Panopticist: William Orbit, King of the Knob Twirlers

February 28, 2005

William Orbit, King of the Knob Twirlers

Posted by Andrew Hearst

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One evening in 1994, my friend Nina sat me down and played me “Water From a Vine Leaf,” an ecstatic seven-minute epic by the British producer and synth wizard William Orbit, whose redesigned website went online yesterday. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that hearing “Water From a Vine Leaf” changed my life. I had been playing guitar for ten years at that point, and under Orbit’s spell I slowly moved away from rock guitar riffing and became an electronics-obsessed knob twirler (though I never stopped playing guitar). By the late ’90s, when it had become possible to cram an entire recording studio inside an off-the-shelf computer, I was spending endless hours at my Mac creating Orbit-influenced electronic tracks and then layering guitars over the top of them. Orbit is also responsible for my discovery of the glories of the resonant analog filter, for which I will be eternally grateful to him.

A couple of years after I discovered Orbit, Madonna enlisted him to be her main collaborator for the album that would become Ray of Light. He is now a very rich man. These days he has a very comfortable and lucrative career producing tracks for artists ranging from U2 and Blur to Pink and All Saints. He’s also known for having more or less discovered Beth Orton, who does a spoken-word thing toward the end of “Water From a Vine Leaf.” In 1993, the same year “Water From a Vine Leaf” was released, Orbit and Orton recorded an album together called SuperPinkyMandy. It was only released in Japan, and it’s now a collector’s item. I have a bootleg of it; it’s very hit or miss.

Orbit’s redesigned site has a lot of rare stuff on it, including dozens of snippets of the music he’s been working on for his next solo record. He hasn’t recorded an album of his own material since the mid-’90s, so the sound samples are especially cool to hear. (Pieces in a Modern Style, his collection of electronic versions of classic works by Bach, Satie, and other composers, was recorded in the mid-’90s but wasn’t given wide release until 2000.) The site’s video section includes the original “Water From a Vine Leaf” video, which I had never seen before. It’s a misguided New Age mess. Beth Orton appears in it, whirling like a dervish.

Orbit’s best work straddles the worlds of experimental electronica and blissed-out pop. He has a genius for taking four or five simple musical elements—a simple beat, a slithering bass line, a lush synth pad, a keyboard stab with rhythmic echoes—and playing them off each other until a track just explodes from all the momentum. A typical Orbit track is spacious and uncluttered and organic and warm—qualities missing from most other electronic music and pop music these days, I think.

I don’t care for much of Madonna’s music, it’s safe to say, even if I do respect her talent for being famous. But I think Ray of Light is one of the great pop records of the last decade or two. And it still sounds totally fresh. Madonna and Orbit were a perfect match: She helped funnel his sound into tightly crafted pop song structures, tamping down the self-indulgence that had occasionally mired his own records in monotonous groovage. And he gave her something she has never had much of (before or since): impeccable musical taste.

My favorite of Orbit’s own records is Hinterland, which he released under the name Strange Cargo. It’s full of lush analog textures and propulsive beats. One of its best tracks is the sinister-sounding “Montok Point” [sic], which interpolates an excerpt from a creepy monologue by Joe Frank, the brilliant L.A. radio artist. I’ll be writing a separate post soon about Joe Frank, a great American genius whose brilliance has mostly gone unacknowledged.

You can listen to a few of my Orbit-influenced tracks on my music page.